What are the steps to set up AWS Global Accelerator for a multi-region application

1. Deploy Your Application in Multiple AWS Regions
Begin by deploying your application infrastructure (such as EC2 instances, Application Load Balancers, or Network Load Balancers) in multiple AWS Regions. This multi-region deployment is essential to improve availability and reduce latency by serving users from the nearest region[11].

2. Create an AWS Global Accelerator
- Open the AWS Global Accelerator console and choose to create a new accelerator.
- Provide a meaningful name for your accelerator.
- Select the accelerator type as Standard (which is suitable for most web applications).
- Choose the IP address type: either IPv4 or DUAL-STACK (IPv4 and IPv6).
- AWS Global Accelerator will allocate two static Anycast IP addresses for your accelerator. These IPs serve as fixed entry points for your application traffic globally[3][5][7].

3. Configure Listeners
- Create one or more listeners on your accelerator. A listener defines the protocol and port (for example, TCP port 80 for HTTP or TCP port 443 for HTTPS) that Global Accelerator will use to accept incoming client traffic.
- Listeners are responsible for processing inbound connections and forwarding them to the appropriate endpoint groups[5][6].

4. Set Up Endpoint Groups for Each Region
- For each listener, configure one or more endpoint groups. Each endpoint group corresponds to an AWS Region where your application is deployed.
- You specify the AWS Regions that will receive traffic through these endpoint groups.
- You can configure health checks for each endpoint group so Global Accelerator continuously monitors the health of the endpoints in that region.
- Optionally, adjust the traffic dial percentage per endpoint group to control the portion of traffic routed to that region (useful for gradual rollouts or failover scenarios)[5][6][7].

5. Add Endpoints to Endpoint Groups
- Register the specific endpoints within each endpoint group. Endpoints can be Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses deployed in the corresponding region.
- You can assign weights to endpoints to control how traffic is distributed among them within the same region[5][6][7].

6. Update DNS Records
- Update your domain’s DNS records to point your application’s Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) to the static Anycast IP addresses provided by Global Accelerator. This ensures that client requests are routed through the accelerator[12].

7. Monitor and Adjust Traffic Routing
- Use AWS Global Accelerator’s monitoring tools to observe traffic distribution and endpoint health.
- Adjust traffic dials or endpoint weights as needed to optimize performance or handle failover scenarios.
- Global Accelerator automatically routes traffic to the closest healthy endpoint, improving latency and availability[5][11].

This setup allows your multi-region application to benefit from AWS Global Accelerator’s static IP addresses, health checks, and intelligent routing to improve global performance and resiliency. It supports both active-active deployments (load-sharing traffic across regions) and active-standby failover models[11].

In summary, the key steps are: deploy your app in multiple regions, create the accelerator, configure listeners, set up regional endpoint groups with endpoints, update DNS to use the accelerator’s IPs, and monitor/adjust traffic as needed.

Citations:
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/getting-started.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7iC_sIM4QU
[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/about-accelerators.creating-editing.html
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVLngF-st5o
[5] https://www.nops.io/glossary/what-is-aws-global-accelerator/
[6] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-get-started.html
[7] https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/
[8] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/
[9] https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/REPEAT_2_Using_AWS_Global_Accelerator_for_multi-region_applications_NET202-R2.pdf
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUYvzTd9vKE
[11] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/deploying-multi-region-applications-in-aws-using-aws-global-accelerator/
[12] https://repost.aws/questions/QUo8q_KZ2fTz2PjaiJc9ztEQ/using-aws-global-accelerator-service-to-distribute-traffic-across-multiple-regions